What is LegendCup all about?
LegendCup.com is one of the last remaining independent fan-sites for Monster Rancher with community driven research and vetting for data integrity for the Monster Rancher series of games. It has a over 6000 images from across the games, a vast knowledge base of technical data and inner workings of many of the games, and archives of several other Monster Rancher websites that are no longer around due to their owners having passed away or being abandoned.We've got a community Discord server, a group calendar for PVP tournaments and other MR events as well!
This is not a fandom wiki, or property hosted under a corporate umbrella to serve you ads. This website is a hand-written-in-a-text-editor passion project supported by dedicated fans, technical folks, and funded out of pocket/donations to help keep an ad-free experience for all.
Originally, LegendCup.com was created because I wanted to find a way to unite trainers across the United States and Canada (or anyone playing the NTSC version of the game) and begin having Tournaments online with other players. As of late, LC is not running its own tournaments but will promote those who are running/streaming tournaments, streaming the game, or who are in general promoting Monster Rancher.
At the time of release, this is a rare game to find others playing locally despite it's greatness, so I went online thinking to myself that there must be other people that know about, and play this game. Bonus Trivia: A story about how I got to this point.
To my surprise there was a very large Online Community where I met Lisa Shock, of Monster Rancher Metropolis. It was then I was encouraged to speak out and recruit for tournaments... as the Idea was not original, but no one had ever successfully accomplished hosting a Monster Rancher Tournament site.
Remember, this is late 1999, early 2000. There was no such thing as Online console gaming, and the internet speed was through a 56k Dialup modem. If only tools such as Discord had existed back then.
Well, after practically a year of rallying other online users, people slowly started catching on and gaining interest and this Yahoo Geocities site with annoying ads evolved into a paid-for hosted site, Legendcup.com, named after the Final Tournament, "The Legend Cup", that can get your monster into the Hall of Fame in the Monster Rancher 2 game.
To actually fight in the tournaments you one would use these:
MR1 & MR2: Playstation Game Console, the Game, a Memory Card, and a DexDrive ($9)
MR3 & MR4: Playstation2 Game Console, the Game, a Memory Card, and SharkPort ($29)
Game-Saves were emailed (or sometimes snail-mailed) to Legendcup where I would organize the game-save files onto memory cards, then arrange round-robin fights until there was a victor.
Events were relayed in real-time in an online chatroom, in a chat version of a radio-style announcer of a fight. Fights were recapped and posted for later viewing for people that did not get to attend.
After a time, I also broadcast the fights over a webcam. Yes, this was still on 56k Dial-Up so you can imagine, the resolution was very tiny. The setup involved an over-shoulder camcorder I had at the time, aimed at a 13" tube television at just the right distance to fill up the viewing area.
Check out the Guides / FAQs section If you are looking for Detailed data on:
A sort of interesting Story.
A very close friend of mine introduced me to the first Monster Rancher game. We were really excited about the novelty of using our CD collection that generated monsters, and we were both serious Street Fighter fans and also goofed around with Tamagotchi for fun, so this felt like a very interesting combination of the two.
Neither of us had beat the game, but we raised monsters all the same, and fought them against each other for bragging rights. When Monster Rancher 2 came out, of course I bought into it.
My wife and I were working opposite shifts at the time. I had introduced her to the game as just something fun to do while I was at work and she was at home. She had only been playing it for a few weeks while I'd been playing it for over a year. One day I came home to her with the game paused. She couldn't wait to show me that she had beat the game!
Of course I was thrilled, but at the same time I was a little sad and somewhat annoyed that she completely destroyed me with her game-beating monster, which at the time I thought were massively powerful monsters.
We are very competitive, and neither myself, or my friend that introduced me to the game could beat her monsters except on rare occasions. So, what is a husband to do? Of course I looked online for tips to gain an edge and finally defeat her reign!!!
So in reality, for the birth of LegendCup.com, you can thank:
- My friend, for introducing me to the game...
- My wife, for kicking my butt resulting in me looking for an edge online, leading to the discovery of the Monster Rancher Community...
- And Lisa Shock, for encouraging me about the idea of online tournament events. I learned a lot about how the internet worked in 2000, and how to make a website, and those things ultimately lead to an interest outside of the career path I was on, and into something new, and became a friend both to my wife and myself.